ROOL News: Latest news: Category Community

Bug tracker temporarily offline

Andrew Hodgkinson — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 10:28:00 +0000

A fault has developed in our bug tracker that causes it to consume all CPU on our web server when we attempt to start it. The problem seems related to the Subversion repository and causes sufficient load of the back-end database that the rest of the web site becomes unable to respond – this was the cause of our brief site down time earlier this week.

I’m investigating the problem but other commitments mean it may be a while before it can be resolved. In the mean time, if you have bugs to report or discuss, please use the bugs forum.

Thanks for your patience!

Changes to the Bounty scheme

Steve Revill — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 15:37:00 +0000

ROOL are pleased to announce that we are refreshing the list of bounties available on our bounties page. We’ve expired a couple of bounties which aren’t really attracting any interest and we will be rolling-out a couple of new bounties for things which we believe are very important items for the roadmap of RISC OS development. Keep watching this space… :)

New offers and new prices for the latest Developer Tools

Steve Revill — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 15:25:00 +0100

RISC OS Open is pleased to announce the formal release of version 22 of the ROOL Desktop Development Environment (DDE) tools. Building upon the interim version 21, which was released earlier this year, the main feature of these releases is a major upgrade to the assembler ObjAsm and its associated documentation. ROOL is also announcing new reduced prices and special offers.

ObjAsm Updates

ObjAsm now fully supports the new UAL variant of the ARM instruction set, including over 400 new instructions. UAL syntax is supported up to ARMv7, VFPv4 and NEON™, for CPUs up to the Cortex™-A9. Pre-UAL syntax for ARM and Thumb is extended to its final version for ARMv6 and VFPv3. A significant number of extensions to the supporting assembly language have also been added, many of which have up to now only been available in ObjAsm’s counterpart in ARM’s RVDS™ toolchain, and the ObjAsm manual (supplied in PDF format) has been fully revised and updated so you can make best use of these.

All the new instructions, and some related new relocation types, are fully supported by Link and the disassembly tool DecAOF. An extension to the AOF object file format, to support new types of floating point linkage (mainly related to the introduction of VFP support) is supported in ObjAsm, Link and DecAOF.

Other Updates

Updated versions of SparkFS and !PDF are included. Squeeze has been adapted for compatibility with the A9Home. There have been a number of bugfixes to various components too. For full details, see here and here.

ROOL doubling-up bounty donations

Steve Revill — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 17:20:00 +0100

ROOL is hereby pledging to match, pound for pound, the first £1000 donated into our bounty scheme, spread across all bounties. This means that every £1 you donate is worth £2 to a developer who implements your chosen bounty. It also means that it’s in your interest to donate early, while this money is still available! We will keep the remaining amount available visible on the bounty page so you have some idea how much longer you can take advantage of this scheme.

There is one exception: we won’t be matching donations to the RISC OS Open administration bounty, since this would just be paying money back into the same fund from which we’re making the matched donations, so this would be pointless!

We will be starting by matching the donations already made into the bounty scheme. The donation matching process will be performed manually by ROOL staff so don’t be surprised if it takes a few days before the matching donation from ROOL appears in the relevant pot!

For more information, please take a look at this page.

RISC OS Open Bounties

Steve Revill — Thu, 26 May 2011 02:00:00 +0100

Development of RISC OS has been increasing in pace since the first batch of source code was published here on the 19th May 2007. There have been people purchasing the development tools from us all over the globe, from the US through Europe, Russia and out to New Zealand and Australia. We’re seeing more and more people getting stuck in and contributing to the future of the OS.

We are extremely grateful to all of those who are contributing their time and energy in return for little more than the knowledge that they have contributed. Things being the way they are, however, it’s sometimes difficult to find the time to put into such a labour of love.

What could sometimes help an enthusiastic developer to find a bit of extra free time is a small financial reward. And we think there is a way to do this: the ROOL Bounty Scheme. It is an opportunity for the RISC OS community as a whole to make their voices heard by voting with their wallets…

Planned web site down time

Andrew Hodgkinson — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 13:28:00 +0000

The RISC OS Open web site will be undergoing a few changes in the next day or two. These include an evolution of the existing site design which renders more quickly in NetSurf and replacement of the problematic Wiki engine with one which will hopefully prove more reliable.

It is necessary to take the site offline completely during the upgrade process. Data must be migrated from the old to new Wiki and no changes can be permitted during that time. The web server architecture is being overhauled too. As a result we are planning for an hour or two of downtime in the next couple of days.

ROOL at the RISC OS London Show

Steve Revill — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 16:23:00 +0100

RISC OS Open are pleased to announce that we will be attending the ever-popular RISC OS London Show on Saturday 23rd October 2010 at the St. Giles Hotel, Feltham, London.

We will be bringing a number of exciting developments along with us, including:

The latest version of RISC OS on the Beagle Board
RISC OS 5 running on the Touch Book
The free RPCemu emulator running the equally free RISC OS 5
Some other bits and bobs

ROOL are also looking to speak with the community about how to move forward with our proposed roadmap for RISC OS development.

Take a look at the official show site here.

Roadmap for the future of RISC OS

Steve Revill — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 22:51:00 +0100

Following from the publishing of the source code on the ROOL site, RISC OS development has gained momentum over the past couple of years. We are close to a point where we can say one flavour of the OS, RISC OS 5, can run on most of the current platforms: Beagle Board, IYONIX pc, RiscPC, A7000 and emulation.

Within ROOL, we don’t want things to stop there. What we would like to see is for all of the talented developers out there to be paired up with tasks that they are interested in working on which contribute to the ‘greater good’ of the system.

As a tentative first step in that direction, we have published a list of the sorts of tasks which we feel could be adopted in order to move things along. We haven’t prioritised them or done anything more than simply enumerate everything (significant) that we can think of.

We’re sure there are more good ideas out there and there is probably some stuff in our Wish Lists forum that we’ve missed. We would very much welcome feedback from the community – so add the things to our list that you think are important to the future development of our favourite operating system.

Birmingham MUG Show, Sat 10th July

Steve Revill — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:10:00 +0100

RISC OS Open will be attending this year’s Midland User Group (MUG) show on Saturday the 10^th^ July at:

St John’s Church Hall 205 Warwick Road Kenilworth Warwickshire CV8 1HY

This will be a great opportunity for you to come and find out what the latest developments are in the RISC OS scene and see some demos of RISC OS running on new ARM-based hardware platforms, emulators and native RISC OS machines.

For more information, take a look at the official MUG Show site.

RISC OS Open at Acorn World

Steve Revill — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 01:26:00 +0100

This weekend, RISC OS Open will be attending the Acorn World part of Britain’s largest celebration of vintage computing: the Vintage Computing Festival in Bletchley Park from 19th-20th June 2010.

We will be proving that RISC OS is still alive and well with a range of demonstrations, including:

RISC OS on the Beagle Board
RISC OS under emulation
Future RISC OS hardware platforms (Touch Book)

Come along and find out what all of the fuss is about! You can also help support the cause and pick up some ROOL merchandise, including:

Mugs
T-shirts
Show CDs with the latest software and sources
Developer tools

The Acorn World section is supported by the RISC OS User Group of London.